The theme of this very interesting book is the distinctive and central contribution that Judaism and Jewish education make to Emmanuel Levinas's overall philosophical achievement. Education, Katz argues, is the link between the crisis of humanism that we face in part as a result of the hegemony of privileging personal interests and claims, on the one hand, and the realization of the Levinasian conception of ethical subjectivity as infinite responsibility to and for the other person, on the other. Education as the link between the situation in which we find ourselves and the attainment of our ideals can be found in Rousseau, and it recurs here in the case of Levinas in a distinctive way. But in much twentieth-century moral and political philosophy it is a forgotten theme.
Katz argues that education provides more than a route or procedure whereby children or others without a developed moral sensibility acquire the requisite orientation and understanding. In addition, it contributes to the very normativity of the ethical, as Levinas understands it. She calls this normative element ceding “one's own ego to the Other.” Education, then, and specifically Jewish education, are what give one's intersubjective relations their normative dimension, the claim upon the “I” to give up its rights and interests to the other person. This is a very strong claim on Katz's part. On the one hand, it makes Levinas's thinking about Judaism and Jewish education central to his philosophical project, and, on the other hand, it makes Jewish education the vehicle by which our intersubjective relations gain their normativity.
In chapter 1 of her book, Katz defends “the role education plays in the cultivation of the self, and more specifically, in the cultivation of a moral self” (22). In particular, she explores two models of humanistic education, one which she associates with Hannah Arendt and the other which she finds in the work of John Dewey. Katz uses these two models as a device for exploring how humanities education is defended and how it is attacked, and in the end she claims the truth lies somewhere between the two options.
Against the background of the tensions within and between these two models, Katz then argues that Levinas's writings on Jewish education explore how it features a particular conception of the moral self, in particular a conception of the self as infinitely responsible. Levinas is concerned with a very basic and fundamental question: “how do we become a subject who puts the Other before our own self-interests? How do we become a subject who can put centrality of our own self-interest into question?” (39). His answer is that what we call “humanities” or “liberal” education will not produce such a result, but Jewish education will. The “crisis of humanism” that Katz goes on to explore in chapter 3, as diagnosed by Levinas in his early writings, is a crisis of the ideal of self-sufficiency (40–41, 52–57). She focuses on Levinas's important 1934 paper “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” and various other essays from the 1930s and then 1960s. With regard to the essay on Hitler fascism, she concludes that Levinas sets himself a challenge to avoid allegiance solely to transcendence or to materiality and rather to show how we can “give an account of transcendence that does not dispense with this world, the world of suffering” (65–66) but calls us to cope with it.
The title of chapter 4 is “Before Phenomenology.” Here, Katz calls attention to a point central to Levinas's conception of selfhood, “an underlying concern that there is a normative dimension to this ethical subject” (80), and she introduces her important claim that somehow Jewish education makes a contribution to the very normativity of the face-to-face.
What does Katz mean by “normativity?” The problem is this. In one sense, Levinas claims that the face-to-face or infinite responsibility is an-archic and without an origin; it is diachronic and always already true of the subject's relation to each and every other person. For any given relationship and at any given moment when the subject encounters or is related to another person, that subject is infinitely responsible to and for that other person. Such responsibility never comes into being; it is always already in place. But, at the same time, there is a sense in which each one of us can act in ways that are more or less responsive and responsible for and to a particular other person. At the transcendental level, we are responsible always and in every relationship; at the ordinary, everyday level, we are always more or less responsible, depending on what we do and how we act. When Katz calls our ethical subjectivity “normative,” what she is referring to, I think, is this second sense of responsibility, the sense in which in our ordinary lives our relationships and actions are more or less responsive to the claims made on us by all the other persons with whom we are engaged.
Katz's way of putting this is to ask that “we not read Levinas's project as either/or but rather as both/and,” and she argues that what links the two dimensions of Levinas's view is education and specifically Jewish education. It is what enables the child to become an adult. It is education that is a response to the fact that our ethical subjectivity is a moral ideal as well as a basic feature of our interpersonal existence. In other words, the centrality of education to Levinas's thinking shows that our ethical subjectivity is not simply given; it must be developed, nurtured, and acquired.
We can understand what Katz means by “normativity,” then, by asking about the sense in which the face-to-face or ethical subjectivity is an ideal, that is the sense in which it confronts the undeveloped self as model and hence in which it sets a normative standard for selfhood. She then asks: from whence derives the normative authority of this ethical subjectivity as an ideal or obligation? This is a different and deeper question than the question of whether there is a command issued by the face of the other person; it is the question of what makes it a command or, as she puts it, what gives that command normative force.
In order to clarify how Levinas seeks to answer this question, Katz turns to a paper by Steven Crowell on intersubjectivity and normativity (86–87). Crowell draws on Sartre in order to show that Levinas's use of shame, as the subject's response to the claim of the other, already shows that the other's transcendence is itself constituted by normativity. Another way of putting this, I would say, is that Crowell makes the important point about Levinas's account that the face -to-face does not derive its normative authority from elsewhere; rather its otherness or transcendence with regard to the subject is already normative. What Katz then adds to this claim is the point that it is Levinas's philosophical work as a form of teaching and of educational contest that constitutes this normativity. “Levinas's philosophical work … assumes the form of education, cultivation, or formation …. A child is introduced to normativity and reared to understand this normative conception as relationship to and responsibility for the Other” (90). In this way, then, “the epiphany of the face” is both “the ground of ethics and its goal” (102, cf. 129).
How does philosophy become education? It does so, Katz claims, when it turns to religion and in particular to Judaism and Jewish education, that is the exposure to and interpretation of Jewish texts, especially the Bible and the Talmud. In this way, something does “explain” the normativity of the intersubjective encounter and also shows how we not only must come to notice the other person's suffering but also must do something about it. Education and Jewish education serve both purposes; they provide this explanation and result in conduct on behalf of others, not merely a new form of understanding. In this way, she believes that Judaism and Jewish education “explain” the normative or obligatory nature of the subjectivity which our interpersonal existence calls us to actualize. This subjectivity is an ideal for everyone, and hence “the ethical subject can be described in philosophical language,” although “how that ethical relationship comes about” is described in Jewish terms (96).
But what is attainable within the Jewish community through a return to its texts is attainable by non-Jews through a revised conception of education that is in tune with that model (103), in which the great texts become “a source of teaching rather than a mere object of study” (113). In chapter 6 Katz turns to Totality and Infinity and seeks to show that this same conception of the crisis of humanism and the centrality of education and teaching that are so prominent in his Jewish writings also inform that philosophical work. In this way, she argues that “the face is both the ground and the aim of ethics,” to use Martin Kavka's formulation (129). In Totality and Infinity, as in his Jewish writings, education or teaching is how the self “becomes an ethical subject.” Moreover, throughout her treatment of the role of these texts for non-Jewish education and the Talmud for Jewish education, Katz focuses on “modeling the kind of interaction encouraged by or reflected in the Bavli for educational practice” (138). The Talmud shares with this literature, when viewed from the perspective of a theorist like Bakhtin, a special status; “the text becomes part of the social relation, not as something to replace another human member of the educational community, but as a supplement” (139). The challenge that Katz discloses, then, is an ethical one that is also an educational and political one. It requires an effort and a commitment that is demanding, exceedingly so, and Katz underscores in conclusion how rare such an accomplishment is (148–149).
It is tempting to read Katz's book as if it were answering the simple, if challenging, question: how does one come to be an adult subject responsive to the needs and demands of other persons? I have tried to show, by exploring her argument, that she wants to claim more and that her detailed examination of texts, many rarely considered Jewish writings, and her overall argument has purposes that are much deeper and much more profound. In the end, I am not persuaded that she succeeds in showing that Jewish education provides the “warrant” or “explanation” for the normativity of ethical subjectivity. I think that Katz is looking in the wrong place to find an “explanation” for the normative force or authority of that ideal. Nonetheless, she has a boldly conceptual and not simply a practical goal in mind. For this reason, in addition to its excellent readings of many texts and its helpful contextualizing of Levinas's project, Katz's book is a very good one indeed and one to be highly recommended.
